She sat down on her bed, her mind reeling. Why should she feel this could not happen; she had taken no precautions for the two weeks during which the sex was almost non-stop, going right over her fertile period. So why did she feel both surprised and shocked.
For more than a month now she had tried to pretend that Mark was just a figment of her imagination, that her time in Australia was an imagined fantasy that she had dreamt about. But this was no divine conception and it certainly had not happened since her return to England; no men had been remotely close to her since then, except in those recurring awful dreams. So the shocking truth, that her mind now had to confront, was that this man, the man whose face evoked a shuddering horror in her mind, was the father of her child.
Suddenly her mind shifted to her time in Sydney and David’s forlorn face as she said goodbye. Was it just possible that the child was his? It was not likely, her period was barely finished on the first night they slept together and the second night was only a day later. Still there was a slight chance it was. She had heard of rare cases where it happened from sex almost right after a period. Somehow the idea that David could be the father of her child seemed infinitely preferable to it being Mark’s child.
One man was a normal healthy man, kind and decent with no significant flaws that she knew of. Her cousin, Ruth, who knew him well, said he was a really lovely man, and her own experience had backed that up. The other was, she tried to think of an appropriate term to describe Mark, but all she could come up with was the term she had been trying to avoid, a psychopath. Mark, the father of her child was a psychopath who had murdered numerous other people, and she had almost been the next victim. So, even though she knew she was probably clinging to a false hope, she was not prepared to totally discount the chance that the father of her child was the good man not the crazy evil man.
She looked around her bedroom. It really was time to get a place of her own again; staying at her parents, as she had done for the last six months since splitting from former boyfriend Edward, was not a long term option when you were in your mid-twenties. She needed her own place; somewhere back towards the city of London, not here forty miles out, comfortable and convenient though it was.
Her eyes fell on an envelope on the mantel. It was the letter from David, the one that she had carelessly cast aside about three weeks ago when it arrived, unwilling to allow any memories of her Australian trip to find their way into her life back in England. When that letter arrived it seemed an unwelcome intrusion from another place. Now she knew that the other place could not be so easily excised, at least not unless she had a termination of her pregnancy – that word somehow seemed more acceptable than abortion.
Her mind seized on this new idea, she was sure it was the best solution. In the same way as she had physically excised Mark from her life, dispatched him to an obscure watery grave, into the bellies of hideous creatures, she would excise this new unwelcome life from her body. She was on the point of getting ready to go out and make a doctor’s appointment. That would start the required arrangements; she was still very early and it should only take a day or two to resolve, she thought.
But somehow, before she could make herself walk out to do this, she found her hand had picked up David’s letter. She felt very fickle for doing so.
She had not wanted to know him anymore before this situation arose. Yet now she was contemplating whether he was a suitable father to her child, even though the possibility of him being the father was unlikely. So why did she even let her mind go to this place?
But it was like an external force, one outside her own being, was controlling her hand. She felt an overriding need to bring certainty to this mess before she acted to end it. She half wished it would be a polite letter wishing her well, saying he had met someone else.
She tore open David’s letter; it had a single folded sheet inside. She removed and unfolded this. It was three quarters covered with neat and precise writing.
She sat down again on her bed and consciously cleared her mind of all extraneous things before she allowed herself to read. She needed to think clearly and this deserved her full attention. Focus on the here and now and don’t try and work out the future right now, she told herself. She started reading, half saying the words aloud to give it more reality.
“Dearest Susan,
I missed you more than I can say after you left. I am not sure whether I was anything more to you than a passing fling, but to me you were someone wonderful and special. I would really love to stay in touch, or better still have a continuing relationship, should the chance arise.
You may be interested to know that I am flying to London for ten days in a month’s time, arriving the week that runs from the end of September to the start of October. The first two days are for business meetings related to my work, for which London is a key business node. However I have set aside a further week for a holiday while there. I fly in very early on the Monday morning and leave on the Wednesday evening the following week, and my work is only the first Monday and Tuesday, with Tuesday clear after 5 pm.
Should you have some time to catch up again, while I am there, I would really love to see you. I have booked a sports car for a week, a car just like my one in Sydney. Perhaps you could come with me on a drive in the beautiful English countryside to see some of those numerous grand old houses and castles, not to mention some of your cute village pubs. So I hope we can work something out that suits you. Seeing you, even at the weekend, would be great. My time is free all week and a week spent with you would be wonderful.
I do not want to intrude on your other relationships or commitments, but I am hoping you are able to come away with me. Please let me know if you do not want to see me.
I won’t try to contact you again if I don’t hear from you. I will treat it as you not wanting to keep in touch and respect that.
Love from David.
It was signed with a cursive flourish, with a couple of little gilt hearts stuck on.
Susan could not help smiling. Despite her situation; there was something so warm and engaging in the letter and his manner, both factual and to the point, but also like a breath of summer breeze.
She looked at her calendar. The month since he had posted this had almost passed and now he was arriving in two days. It was now Saturday morning and he must be flying out tomorrow at the latest. It seemed awfully late to make a reply.
Yet she had been unkind to him when she had last seen him, sure she had given her address but it was under sufferance. Now she did not want it to end that way. Her decision was really made by the time she had finished reading. Yes, she would see him again and go travelling with him. Her work was not so all consuming that she could not find a few days to be away. She knew, even though she really needed to ask first, that she could manage to take off the Wednesday to Friday of next week.
She realised she was just using this as a distraction to avoid having to face up to her real situation, but what a welcome escape it would be not to have to think about this baby thing for a few days, and after that her mind should be much clearer. After that there would be more than enough time for her to decide what to do about it.
She did not think she would tell David, at least not during their trip away, but she felt that she at least owed it to them both to see whether there was any real substance to this relationship and, after spending the five days together, she hoped she would have a better idea about that. Then, at the end, if it seemed to work between them, she could tell him about the child and see how her responded, before she made a definite decision to terminate. Her mind rationalised this was a reasonable and sensible way forward.
Now she had her own job to do. She must contact him and let him know she had not totally forgotten or ignored him. She looked at the address line on the letter. Sure enough, as well as a mail address, there were phone numbers and an email address. With the time difference email was better. Plus she wanted her next real contact with him to be face to face to see how sh
e felt actually being with him not just hearing his voice from the other side of the world. So she fired up her computer and wrote.
Dear David,
Thank you so much for writing. I am sorry to be so late in replying but a few other things have come up. I hope the delay in reply has not messed up your plans.
I would like to see you again. What happened between us in Sydney was unexpected but nice. I am still not quite sure myself how I feel about it all, but I do like the idea of a country trip with you.
I have organised to have next Wednesday to Sunday free, as this should fit with your need to do work on the Monday and Tuesday.
What I suggest is that, as you fly in very early Monday morning and probably need a good night’s sleep to adjust to jet lag, that you stop in a hotel in London for Monday night and come out to my family’s house in Reading for dinner on Tuesday. It is the address on your letter.
I know my parents will be keen to meet you, and my Mum is a great cook. So there is bound to be something edible on the menu.
There is an office at the back of our house with a fold out bed which you can use, for that night if you want, to avoid another hotel room. Then we can head away for our country trip on Wednesday.
Let me know if that suits and looking forward to seeing you again.
Love Suz.
Chapter 2 – Catfish Man’s Catch
Charlie was getting old. He could feel it in his bones. The weather was moving out of the Gurrulwa, or big wind time, into the Dalirrgang, or build-up time. That hot sweaty weather was really building each day now. In the way the white fellas counted time it was the end of September. The mornings were still starting cool but by morning smoko he could feel his shirt stick to his back from the sweat. By lunch time a lie down under a shady tree was the place to be.
Once upon a time, when he was a young and fiery buck, he could go all day. Ten hours or twelve hours in the stinking October heat was nothing to him. Then he could hit the town at night time with his mates for a party and still be up at the crack of dawn for another just as long day of work.
He had lived a full life and a good life. Sure, sometimes he had lived rough, sometimes the grub was poor. But, for a boy from Retta Dixon in Darwin, whose mother was a proud Larrakia woman and whose father was a stockman from the buffalo country out east of Darwin, that Point Stuart Country around where the Mary and Wildman Rivers ran, he had done OK.
His father had not been much good really, a white fella, with a bit of Chinese, who mostly shot buffalo for their skins, and odd times shot a few crocs and broke a few horses. He only visited his Mum now and then, mostly when he wanted a bit, but she had stuck to him while he fathered three kids, two with mostly dark skin like his mother’s, and a third, himself, who had a lot more of his father’s white fella skin and even a dash of the Chinese about him; some people had called him a yella fella when he was young. So of course when the cops and field officers had spotted him in the camp near Darwin they had grabbed him, quick smart, and taken him to Retta Dixon, where he had lived for ten years.
They thought of it as trying to civilise the black fella out of him and turn him into a proper white fella, he thought that they had it a bit arse about, there was more civilisation in his mother’s Larrakia tribe than in some of the scum whites that hung about the town, his father was really one of them scum whites, if the truth was told.
Anyway his Mum had been determined not to give him up that easily, but also not to leave her other two children with the tribe’s aunties and uncles and get cut off from her culture. So, while she was given a house on the Retta Dixon grounds when she wanted to visit, and where he could stay with her, mostly he had stayed in a dormitory with other boys around his age.
But she kept coming to see him at least every week, bringing his own brother and sister, and she kept making sure his uncles, aunts and the old people came to see him too. She also found ways to bring him out of the home a lot, so he kept getting tribal knowledge and learning about the bush.
Then, one day, when he was almost old enough to leave Retta Dixon and get a job working on a station, a beautiful girl named Rosie had come to stay at Retta Dixon. She had lived for most of her childhood on Goulburn Island, and her family had come from the Alligator Rivers, somewhere around Jim Jim. She was a half caste, like him, and had been taken away from her parents at a camp near the South Alligator when she was only little. However her family could not visit her at Goulburn Island so she had lost track of them.
Then, when she was thirteen and just turning into a woman, they had sent her to Retta Dixon so that she could learn more; they said she was too smart for the Goulburn Island mob. She was the clever one in the family, and had done real good with her school lessons. So someone had thought that, maybe, she should go to school in Darwin, where they could educate her better.
So she had come to Retta Dixon. From the first time he had seen Rosie he had thought her the most beautiful thing in the world, she had lovely honey coloured skin, and eyes like glowing coals, dark and deep. He was fourteen to her thirteen. Before then he could not wait to get away and go bush. Now suddenly he did not want to leave Retta Dixon anymore, he just wanted any chance to be close to her. It was like puppy love. She had been very shy but he could tell she liked him; she gave him a sort of secret special smile.
However when the year was gone he had to leave and get work, out on a station as he was not so good with books. But he kept coming back to visit Rosie whenever he could, and early on had told his own Mum about her and made sure she still kept visiting too. So gradually he had brought Rosie into his family and she had learnt their customs.
Then when he was eighteen and she was seventeen he had wooed her and when she turned eighteen he had married her. And to this day she was as beautiful to him as the day her first saw her, when she was thirteen. Sure her hair had gone a bit grey and she was a rounder and plumper than the slip of a girl he had married. But that was how grown up women were supposed to look.
His Mum had been like that, plump and shiny, almost until the day she died, ten years ago, and now his wife had taken over her tribal role, as tribe grandmother, even though her true country was somewhere out at the edge of the stone country, the place where where the Jim Jim Creek came over those big waterfalls.
But she had lost her own tribal knowledge as a child and only lately got a little bit back through tracing some cousins. So now she was mostly Larrakia but with a bit of the Gagadju culture.
One thing that Rosie got from his own Mum was a recipe for the best catfish curry he had ever tasted. His Mum had got it from her own Mum, who said she learned it from a Chink in Chinatown, and then improved it.
So now, each year, just at the start of the build-up when the catfish were big and fat, it was his job to go out and get one or two really big catfish for Rosie’s catfish curry. This year she said she wanted two, maybe even three, because she wanted to do an extra big curry to celebrate the engagement of their youngest daughter, Becky, to a lad from the Roper, Jack, who she had just promised to marry.
He was a wild one that boy, not real big but a serious horseman with great reflexes and a handy pair of fists. He had gone a few rounds in the ring with some fancied names and was pretty to watch, so light footed and quick. Somehow he had taken a shine to Becky and Becky to him. So now Rosie wanted to have a big family feast this weekend when Jack would be in town along with a gang from his own family. It was a sort of engagement party.
Charlie liked the lad too. Perhaps Jack reminded him a bit of himself when he was a wild one in his young days; he could scrap a bit too. Then Rosie was like his Becky was now, doing the calming down.
The one useful thing his own father had done for him when he was a lad was taking him fishing and teaching him the ways of fish. He supposed his Dad had also given him a way with horses, even if he more learned that from station work. But his father, when not shooting or poaching crocs, was a seriously good fisherman, it was like he thought with a fish brain. S
o he had taken young Charlie to his favourite fishing spots out on the Mary and Wildman Rivers and taught him the many ways and places to jag a big fish.
So here he was now, at one of those places his father had shown him, long, long ago, on the Mary. Here the biggest catfish could be found, along with a good few barra and other fish. But today was a catfish day and he, Charlie, was far and away the best catfish fisher that he knew.
He had come here last night, leaving home in the dark after dinner. He had driven through the closed gate that stopped most tourists and Darwin weekend warriors. Then he had put up his mosquito net, not right alongside the billabong but well back.
This billabong had some of the biggest bloody lizards he had even seen, what others called crocs. He thought they were just overgrown lizards, with not much more brain. But, even though he did not think they were real smart, he knew they were plenty dangerous. So he kept away from the edge when he was sleeping, better than sharing his swag with one in the middle of the night, when these crocodile spirits came out and searched the land for food. .They might only be spirit crocodiles then, but they could eat you just the same.
Now he had just woken up and put a billy on the fire in the pre-dawn light. The early morning coldness made his old bones ache and he shivered. He wanted to start early and be away before smoko when the real heat started. That way he would be back in Darwin in time for a siesta. He looked forward to the smile when he presented his catch to his dear Rosie. He could, even now, imagine her cackle.
Crocodile Spirit Dreaming - Possession - Books 1 - 3 Page 25
